computer_graphics_tools.html#fractals
Many people are immediately drawn to the bizarrely beautiful images known as fractals.
...
fractals can help alter [false] beliefs that mathematics is dry and inaccessible

Paul: "My teacher just reviewed
everything we studied in the class -- all the equations, all the terms,
everything that's going to be on the final.
-- in 40 minutes. I wish he had just told us this stuff at the start of the year.
When you teach a class, maybe you should say all that stuff up front --
-- make the very first class of the semester exactly like
the last class of the semester."

"We expect students who are learning to write prose
to read *lots* of examples of good prose;
why not the same for students learning to write programs ?"
-- Samadzadeh, possibly quoting someone else.

UNESCO Collection of History of Humanity
http://www.unesco.org/culture/humanity/
This is a universal history of the human mind
encompassing a multiplicity of points of view, memories and opinions
to be found in the various cultures of the world.

The goal of the
Human Brain Project
(HBP)
[do they have a web page ?]
is to implement the best of both neuroscience and computer technology
in the development of a "map" of the human brain that
incorporates both structural
and functional information.
...
The HBP is supporting research efforts to develop
advanced computer tools to study,
manipulate, and dessiminate detailed brain data.
...
the International Consortium of Brain Mapping.

Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996
From: transhuman@umich.edu
Subject: >H Digest
...
From: Mitchell Porter <qix@desire.apana.org.au>
Subject: Re: >H Big numbers and supercomputers
Transhuman Mailing List
[Max More]
> Further to David Cary's helpful summary of units for very large and small
> numbers, here's some mouth-watering stuff from the new issue of Business
> Week (April 29 issue). The feature is called "Speed gets a whole new meaning."
>
> The story describes the quest for ever more powerful supercomputers, the
> current record holder being a 281 gigaflops machine built by an Intel-Sandia
> team. By November Sandia labs will install a new Intel machine, a $46
> million computer "capable of cracking the long-time fantasy speed of 1
> teraflops. That's computer speak for a trillion calculations per second."
> That machine may actually manage 1.8 teraflops.
... the processing capacity of the brain has not been reliably
determined. But a fair estimate is that the 1.5 kilogram organ
has 10^10 neurons with 10^3 synapses firing an average 10 times
per second, which is about 10^14 bits/second. Using 64-bit words
like the largest supercomputers, that's about one teraflop.
-Robert A Freitas, "The Future of Computers", _Analog_,
March 1996.

"WE'RE ALL GENIUSES!"
If there is a unifying message behind the last decade of neuroscience and AI, it is that many of the tasks which appear to come so naturally to us -- observing motion, parsing speech, eavesdropping in a crowded room -- present some of the most computationally intensive tasks our brains perform. A three-year-old parsing the syntax of her mother's tongue or walking through a nursery solves more complicated problems in a minute than your average theoretical physicist solves in a year. (The difference, of course, is that we arrive in the world hard-wired to solve these problems, while the string theorists have to suffer through grad school.) Reconciling ourselves to this new understanding may mean altering our sense of what intelligence is in the first place: our conventional genuises are simply people who possess a better-than-average ability to do something that the brain is naturally very clumsy at, while every normal human on the planet performs astonishingly complex feats every waking second. Deep Blue may never lose another chess match to those pitiful Homo sapiens, but when it comes to, say, recognizing three-dimensional objects moving through space, we're all Kasparovs, and the computers haven't even learned checkers yet.

includes articles
``What Makes Us Human?'' by Steven Quartz,
``Are Empathy and Mind-Reading Related?'' by Vilayanur Ramachandran,
and some information on the promise and limitations of memory drugs.

[human brain][toread ?]
4 October 1999
``The Greatest Learning Machine In The Universe?''
article
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19990904032235data_trunc_sys.shtml
``
the University of Washington husband-wife team of developmental scientists Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl and University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Alison Gopnik, in their new book, 'The Scientist in the Crib.'
Their book is a humorous exploration of how babies learn,
...
Patricia Kuhl says, "We are born to teach, we do this naturally and quite unconsciously. It seems as if nature designed us to teach babies in the same way it designed babies to learn."
...
Developmental scientists are in the crib trying to understanding babies, but when the babies look up they are also trying to understand us.
...
According to Meltzoff, "...
We have this curiosity that in children is called play. Scientists just have bigger and more expensive toys. It's not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children."
...

16 October 2000
``Light Shed On How The Brain 'Thinks' ''
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20000916042208data_trunc_sys.shtml
``Bioengineers at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
...
have uncovered some of the algorithms of learning, the "primitives" the brain uses to comprehend the world.
...
The primitives demonstrate why certain tasks are hard for us to learn, and that there may be fundamental limitations to what is learnable by the human brain.
In an article in the October 12 issue of Nature, Kurt Thoroughman, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, and Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience, report mathematically deconstructing the learning process.''

[human brain]
``Brain unfolding and flattening to view multiple visual areas''
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~sereno/movies.html
an interesting way to visualize patterns of activity on the human brain.
one interesting one is
``This movie shows how one ellipsoidal brain surface can be mapped to a second ellipsoidal brain surface in a point-to-point fashion using information about the curvature of the two brains (the target brain surface is not shown). By repeated application of this algorithm in a binary tree, a canonical brain surface can be constructed. A single point on this surface then indexes single points on all the surfaces from which it was made.''
Uses FreeSurfer.

2002-12-10
I heard about NaNoWriMo for the first time today.
http://NaNoWriMo.org/

Why: The reasons are endless!
To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms!
To write without having to obsess over quality.
To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at parties.
To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on,
taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

...

Did you know there is a group in Vancouver that writes novels in a weekend?
Yes, and they are fools.
Everyone knows that any deep and lasting work of art takes an entire month to make.

...

...
We love the fringe benefits accrued to novelists. ...
The other reason we do NaNoWriMo is because
the glow from making big, messy art, and
watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time.
The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you.
It changes the way you read.
And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

Andrew Koenig <ark@[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Aug 18, 2003 at 03:06 AM
David> My question is this: Do you think one can really take good
David> photographs and develop and mature as a photographer with a
David> point-and-shoot, or is it necessary to have an SLR?
The best piece of advice I've ever seen on this subject came from a
photo workshop I took a number of years ago. Two pieces, actually:
1) There are only two difficult parts of photography: Where to stand
and when to press the button. Everything else is just technique.
2) Everyone is born with 10,000 bad pictures inside. You have to
take all the bad ones before you can start taking the good ones.
When you've taken your 10,000 bad pictures, you'll know beyond
question what kind of equipment you need to realize your photographic
vision. Until then, use what you have and don't worry about it.
--
Andrew Koenig,
http://www.talkaboutphotography.com/group/alt.photography/messages/6277.html

civilizations ... fall into dark ages.
They become ... primitive.
...
Doesn't rebuilding a civilization take dozens of years ?
...
How long does it take to start a new civilization from scratch ?
...
We have a good general library on board.
Original inventors don't know where they're going;
...
But we know everything about making airplanes and such;
we know hundreds of ways of going at it. ...
we can find the quickest way to go
from medieval to specific inventions...

Ch. 22
p. 165:

``jumpstarting'' technology ...
the ``rediscovery'' problem ...
the Applied History of Technology.
...
One of the favorite games was to devise minimal paths
from a given level of technology
back to the highest level
that could be supported in the Slowness.
The details depended on many things ...
the amount of residual scientific awareness (or tolerance),
and the physical nature of the race.
The historian's theories were captured in
programs whose inputs were
facts about the civilization's plight and the desired results,
and whose outputs were
the steps that would most quickly produce those results.
...
``Is radio something they can produce quickly,
from a standing start ?'' ...
``Indeed, my lady Ravna. There are
simple tricks that are almost never noticed
till a very high technology is attained.
For instance,
quantum torsion antennas can be built
from silver and cobalt steel arrays, if the
geometry is correct.
Unfortunately, finding the proper geometry involves
lots of theory and
the ability to solve some large partial differential equations.
There are many Slow Zoners who never discover the principles.

Ch. 23
p. 176

Jefri ... had a sudden insight,
something that many adults in technical cultures never attain.
``I use these things all the time,
but I don't know exactly how they work.
We can follow these directions,
but how would we know what to change ?''
Amdi was getting all excited now...
No, no, no. We don't have to understand everything.
...
The directions include options for making small changes.
...
I think we can expand the tables
...

ch. 25
p. 191

... Sure, in principle
we gave them enough information to do the mod.
It looks to me like making this expanded spec table
is equivalent to solving a, hmm... a 500 node numerical PDE.
And little Jefri claims that all his datasets are destroyed...
...
... I see what you mean.
You get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget
what it must be like without them.

the Bootstrap Alliance:

The grand challenge is to boost the Collective IQ of organizations and of society.
Success of this effort will improve the capacity to address any other grand challenge.
...

Our Mission is to:

...
Share the A-B-C's of Bootstrapping and
support co-evolution of human organizations and their tools;
...

``tools that build tools''
is part of the general bootstrapping problem.

http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir2/cs_maze/
talks about the bootstrap problem of
``creating a decent programming environment''.
One would like good text editors and other tools
before one starts to program, but
someone must have programmed those tools ...

Brain: (grabbing Pinky by the nose) Pinkey! Did you hear that?
Type one! Do you know what that means?

Pinky: A little bit less than type two? Poit!

Billie: (laughs)

Brain: No, Pinky, it means nothing less than total world domination!

Pinky: I don't understand, Brain.
...

Brain: That's not surprising. There are four civilization types.
The fouth type uses the energy of the whole universe.
The third, a galaxy.
The second, a star.
Type one civilizations use all the energy of a single world. This world, Pinky.

...

Billie: We're not dealing with human technology here, Eggy.
These rats developed all this stuff from scratch.

"Harmony, Balance and Unity. The yin and the yang.
Yin being flesh Yang being steel, Seperate, Equal, but intertwined. The cyborg.
...
In other words we must
become borg to become borg. Therefore the plan as it is now, is to enhance
develop that suitable design to integrate our technology with ourselves as we
are, Then we "chimny" or "bootstrap" ourslves ..."
--
From: ogrimes at bellatlantic.net (Alan Grimes)
Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 17:00:08
To: transhuman at logrus.org

The Guy I Almost Was
http://www.e-sheep.com/almostguy/
very interesting short story (in comic book format).
simplicity, looking to future vs. looking to present vs. looking to past.
A very brief reference to the "bootstrapping problem".

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/fuddef.html
"many new customers were being scared away from the AMSTRAD
because it had no fan when everybody else did.
So in the end AMSTRAD fitted fans,
right in the back corner where the PSU normally goes.
Of course the AMSTRAD had no PSU there,
...
it kept everybody happy!
Rational people in the know simply cut the wires to the fan
(and never had any problems),
but the majority of users just accepted the constant whine of the fan
as necessary. Such is the power of FUD."

Alan Deikman 1995-12-04
ZNYX Corporation
in his role as
moderator of the < pci-sig at znyx.com > mailing list:

My view: Any silicon these days without errata is most likely not
properly documented, tested, or has less than 10 gates in it. I don't
care what revision it is. It is amazing how many people who should know
better equate silicon errata to "faulty/unusable/unmarketable" product.

If you are of a mind to sell your own product here, do so on your on
products merits, not on FUD generated on competitors. If you want to
post benchmarks, be prepared to back them up with a publicly available
white paper.

With regard to engineers selling their products:

"Engineers don't know how to lie. The truth will be MINE!"
-- Customer of Dilbert's company, upon learning that Dilbert
is an engineer invited to a sales meeting.
"The evidence says you are stupid."
-- Dilbert, upon being asked by the salesperson what he could
have been thinking of by asking an engineer to a sales
meeting.

...
the engines which drive the network change very slowly. Only the dashboards change quickly.

...

We already know what people using networks want:
they want to do what they do now, only cheaper, or faster, or both.
They want to do more interesting stuff than they do now, for the same amount of money.
They strongly prefer open systems to closed ones.
They strongly prefer open standards to proprietary ones.
They will accept ads if thats what pays for interesting stuff.
They want to play games,
look at people in various states of undress,
read the news,
follow sports scores or the weather, and
most of all they want to communicate with one another.

Beware any product which claims that people would prefer information to communication,
any service which claims that people will choose closed systems over open ones,
and any protocol which claims that people will tolerate incompatibility to gain features.
Any idea for a networking service which does not satisfy some basic desire of network users
is doomed to fail.

...

Linux in business
http://www.linuxbusiness.com/en/
Linux - Business applications
has a nice "FAQ against FUD": "The LINUX FUD factor FAQ:
Putting the brakes on the spin doctors"

The QED Project
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/qed/
The aim of the QED project is to build a single, distributed,
computerized repository that rigorously represents all important,
established mathematical knowledge.

ARS:
Out of all of your creations, most people seem to think your lock-cracking robot (Locracker)
is the coolest.
You have said that it was built for a high school computer course.
What was the assignment?
What motivated you to choose to build a lock cracking robot?

NF:
It is a sad reality that
in many high school computer classes the students know more about the subject matter than the teacher.
What made this particular class the most interesting I've ever taken was that
the teacher understood this and got out of the way.
He simply told us, you have nine months to create a large project.
Other than periodic requests for status reports and ocational guest lecturers,
we didn't see him again till the end of the year.
I've never seen people work so hard on a school project in my life.
One student build a television frame grabber on a parallel port,
another build a MIDI flute out of plexiglass, and another wrote an OS.
Six years later, one of these people is building satelites,
another is building the next generation of PDA/cellphone hybrids,
and another became a very well-known programmer at Netscape.
I wish more teachers would take this kind of risk and let the students off their leash.

...

NF:
My second piece of advice is to take things apart.
Calculators, telephones, radios, hair dryers, mice, anything with a screw on the back.
Whenever you get something new, open it,
figure out how it works, then put it back together again.
Parents should encourage their children (especially their daughters) to do this.
It is a good investment.
Nobody I know has ever broken an item by taking it apart,
but a large number of objects have been fixed with the knowledge gained.
It divides those who say "it doesn't work, I need to buy a new one" from
those who say "a shred of paper got caught in the switch".

Most college students go to class expecting to learn the facts.
They want to know how economics or sociology works.
When I teach a class on how the mind works,
students want to know how it works and I should please tell them.
The difficulty with this view is that
most professors don't actually know the answers
to the questions students pose.
Economics professors don't know how the economy works and
sociologists don't know how society works and
I don't know how the mind works.
What we all do have are deeply held beliefs about these subjects.
And we all fervently want to get students to see things our way,
to absorb our point of view and
to understand why our academic enemies are idiots.

...

What would employers like students to know that they don't know?

Corporations across America worry about students knowing
basic business concepts (like accounting),
knowing about how to work in teams,
knowing how to write well,
make oral presentations, and
generally knowing how and why businesses work.
But, where would students learn all this?

``people learn by doing what people want to do.
The more they do, the more curious they get about how to do it better --
if they're interested in doing it in the first place.
You wouldn't teach a kid to drive by giving him the
New York State test manual.
If you want to learn how to drive, you have to drive a lot.
...
Errors in learning by doing bring out questions, and
questions bring out answers.

--
Roger Schank

Teaching Children is a major responsibility,
and the worse part of it, they know that you
...
are all wise, all knowing, etc, etc.
That was the scariest insight I've had in the last four decades.

Anyway, as I learned it:
We have Rules which must be obeyed,
even if sometimes exceptions are made
(and every time you make an exemption,
make it understood that this is an exception.
Even if you tend to grant exemptions on a regular basis.)
and it doesn't matter what other people think/do -
We are not Other People.
And then you pray a lot,
and keep in mind what Oliver Wendel Holmes said about choosing judges.
"No man should be a judge unless he has had small children."
For small children are capable of arguing a moot point
long past its relevance,
they are quick to get to the heart of an issue, and
they have a profound sense of justice and of right and wrong.

--
pyotr filipivich
2000-12-04

We need to rid ourselves of our 'mega egos,'
step out of what's comfortable, safe and the status quo, and
start sharing and learning from
everyone
around us.
This wall
which surrounds the engineering folks of the EDA industry
has got to come down.
I'm reminded of the kids in college who always use big words
to explain simple ideas, just to sound "smart."
...
What kind of learning environment is that [?]
[Is] that what we want to live in, work in, and represent?

_Dumbing Us Down - The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling_
book by John Taylor Gatto
``an important book that will probably change the way you think about schooling.''
-- recc. Brandon Staggs
http://staggs.pair.com/kjbp/kjb-bookstore.html

_The Scientist in the Crib_ book by Alison Gopnik 1999
about constructivist learning
``Most of what we know
we have to construct for ourselves''
-- Lauren B.Resnick

_What Counts:
How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math_
book by Brian Butterworth 1999

the ``Mozart effect'' ...
``music should be an essential part of early childhood.
...
a study published in March 1999
that found that second graders in Los Angeles
scored 27 percent higher than other children
on proportional math and fractions tests
after they were given four months of keyboard training on the piano.''
-- Elizabeth Stilwell

donating PCs to schools
(amazing stories of teachers in 3rd world countries building power generators, etc.)

FIRST robotics,

the ``laptops in the classroom: good or bad ?'' debate

satire such as:

My school has recently
implemented a program of issuing pencils and paper to all students
from 7th grade through high school seniors.
As you can imagine, it's a serious nightmare.
Apart from the usual run of broken pencils,
we have a major problem with students writing notes to each other during class.
Is there any effective way
to allow the teacher to monitor
what students are writing from his/her desk at the front of the class ?
Some of our teachers have come up with creative solutions like
hanging video cameras above each student's desk,
but a method which could be performed on the paper itself would be even better.

``it's not enough to
have a lot of friends OR
be amazingly good at what you're doing --
you gotta have BOTH''
-- solios 2001-09-30

''As far as researching companies as potential employers,
I would think this would fall under general research skills and
the ability to question.
I want people around me who have these abilities and
apply them to every aspect of their lives,
not just in the job search.''
-- BWJones

``MGMT 424, Interpersonal relations in organizations.
... how to deal with interoffice politics,
how to deal with irate customers and employees.
How to network and how to express your opinions without rubbing off the wrong way.
Overall, I feel it was the most useful class I had in college.''
-- asv108

open-source books

online education (web-based education)

etc.

there are number of very important skills we should be teaching students
that are not easily tested on a multiple guess exam.
Critical thinking skills, application of known skills to unfamiliar problems, experimentation.
-- JetJaguar
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12327&cid=208004

DAV: also ``communicates well with peers'' and ``works well in a group''.

DAV: There's actually 2 problems here.
(a) To make sure a student knows 10 important things by the end of the semester,
a teacher will typically test to see which things the student already knows.
Then the teacher can focus their valuable time
on stuff the student still hasn't learned --
sometimes simple repetition helps,
other times teachers try lots of different methods in the hopes of finding
at least one that ``clicks''.
(b) Many teachers have reasonable *opinions* on
the best way to teach these important skills. But no one really knows
how to objectively see which method is best.
(Sometimes there is no one best method --
one method works best with some students with a particular learning style,
another method works best with other students with a different learning style.
)
Sometimes a teacher invents a method that seems reasonable (to that teacher)
but ends up being confusing and worthless to everyone.

DAV: Often students study together,
and it would be really nifty if they could
figure out what was important and quickly test each other on-the-fly,
to maximize their scarce study-time.
Here we're getting into meta-learning --
teaching a student how to make and use his own flashcards
(and to share them with other students)
isn't really a necessary skill in itself, but
often learning this ``extra'' skill speeds up learning the desired skills
-- speaking in a foreign languages, etc.

[FIXME: unknowns ?]

DAV: I remember thinking in elementary school
that when I got a lot of questions wrong/blank on a test,
that reflected badly on *me*.
Now I understand that most tests (except maybe ``final'' tests ?)
are just to see how much I already know so that the teacher can
jump ahead to the first thing I don't already know
(or jump back to review the stuff that I've forgotten).

DAV:
I'm starting to understand that in the learning process,
the person who knows something knows that some things are important
(and tries to test those things),
knows other things that he find interesting
but (hopefully) recognizes that they are not important,
and knows other things that are not important
themselves but help people understand/remember the important things.

Why do occasional killings by students generate
commentary demonizing a generation of young people,
when the more prevalent killings by adults draw no similar fears of widespread grown-up pathology ?

...
The best evidence shows that rates of murder,
school violence, drug abuse, criminal arrest, violent death and
gun fatality among middle- and upper-class teenagers have declined over the last 15 to 30 years.
...

Twenty-five million teenagers attend 20,000 schools nationwide.
Ten students in seven schools committed the widely-publicized shootings of the past 18 months.
Teenage gunners are not representatives of all teens, even alienated, outcast ones, but
are rare, extremely disturbed individuals.
There is no evidence that adolescents are more troubled than adults or
any more disturbed today than they ever were.
...

Exaggerating rare instances of teenage rage into some kind of generation-wide craziness
not only inflicts unwarranted paranoia, blanket surveillance, draconian restrictions and
harmful interference with normal growing up on a generally healthy generation of young people,
it also severely hampers investigation into identifying and forestalling the narrow,
individual psychoses that produce rage killers of all ages.
...

The baseless panic about young people inflamed by so many politicians,
leading psychologists, pundits and institutional scholars
is more damaging to our social fabric than the isolated teenage murders they seize upon. ...
even as they ignore more compelling evidence of deteriorating adult behavior.
This subversion of health and safety goals to politically warped,
crowd-pleasing nostrums about "saving our kids" endangers kids in reality

The _best_ reason to study calculus is because it's beautiful, and
learning about it is fun. However, most people never figure that out,
so they need some _other_ motivation to learn it.

...

The fact that you're asking the question suggests that no one has told
you what the _point_ of calculus is, in which case you might be
viewing it as just another set of tricks for pushing symbols around.

"math can be fun, no matter what they say. If anyone ever asks you (I
saw a lot of questions on Cantor at the Dr. Math site), Rudy Rucker's
book _Infinity and The Mind_ really explains all this stuff in a
surprising amount of detail. Not all his books are all that great,
but this one is a real treat for laypeople interested in infinity."
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/problems/bennett3.19.98.html

S. Coren, author of "The Intelligence of Dogs", there are three types of dog intelligence
http://www.petrix.com/dogint/
(DAV: perhaps learning more about ``dog intelligence''
can help us build more helpful computers ...
)
[FIXME: organize ``intelligence'' section ?]

"Preventing conflicts is the work of politics;
establishing peace is the work of education." -Maria Montessori

It is difficult to learn what you think you already know.
-- unknown

``What gets measured gets done.''
-- unknown

``Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.''

John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
speaks very strongly against modern public schools.
From the author of
_Dumbing Us Down_ book by John Taylor Gatto (1992 ?)
_A Different Kind of Teacher_ book by John Taylor Gatto (2000)

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education.
It has been discovered that
the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli, 1874

``
the core group that once
understood the issues has written its code and moved on; new
programmers have come, left their bit of understanding in the
code and moved on in turn. Eventually, no one individual or
group knows the full range of the problem behind the program,
the solutions we chose, the ones we rejected and why.
...

No one left who understands. Air-traffic control systems,
bookkeeping, drafting, circuit design, spelling, differential
equations, assembly lines, ordering systems, network object
communications, rocket launchers, atom-bomb silos, electric
generators, operating systems, fuel injectors, CAT scans, air
conditioners -- an exploding list of subjects, objects and
processes rushing into code, which eventually will be left
running without anyone left who understands them. A world full
of things like mainframe computers, which we can use or throw
away, with little choice in between. A world floating atop a sea
of programs we've come to rely on but no longer truly
understand or control. Code and forget; code and forget:
programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.
...
''

[check out the "talk back" discussion at the end]
[FIXME: copy to c_programming ? YARMAC ?]

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."
-- Bertrand Russell

If I had one wish for our nation,
I would wish for a turn about of what we value in a person.
We value athletic prowess, and not intelligence.
We value physical attractiveness, and not beauty of the soul.
We value cunning and wealth, and not honesty and integrity.
These lessons should be taught to our youth.
Instead our schools demand athletic competition of every student,
and denigrate the scholar.
Failing to reward excellence rewards failure.

It's nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of
instruction have not yet entirely strangled youthful curiosity, for
this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need
of freedom.

math mnemonics
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/11_2.html
and a very long poem involving a ``black bird'' ...
and some constrained writing.
``Constrained writing is the art of constructing a work of prose or
poetry that obeys some artificially-imposed constraint. For example, there
are two published novels from which the letter 'e' is absent
...
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out the
constraint imposed on this poem.''

``Teachers and a New Educational Technology:
A Fable of sorts (without talking animals)''
by Kenneth W. Umbach, Ph.D. (c)1998
http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/CBT.HTML
"It's not the technology that teaches. It's the teachers."

Over the past 50 years there has been a steady and exponential
degradation of the process of education in the field of physics and mathematics
that is not merely deplorable, but
could actually be seen as a dangerous thing
considering the world we live in and the forces that physics has unleashed thus far.
-- Arkadiusz Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanov2.htm

"wisdom ... the ability to devise perfect ends and
to achieve those ends by the perfect means."
-- A. W. Tozer.

http://www.valerieslivingbooks.com/
is apparently a home school family;
runs the Home School Bookroom mailing list;
apparently runs the Home School Bookroom web ring
of home school families recommending books to each other
and trading books / going to used book sales for each other.
[bookstores]

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
-- G.K. Chesterton

"How do you know so much about everything?" was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was "By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant."
-- John Abbott

As a kid growing up in Bombay,
it never occurred to me that lightning can strike anyone living in a city.
I used to imagine that the city builders normally protected us from such eventualities.
It was my firm belief that great scientists, thinkers, and statesmen around the world were
incessantly and proactively working towards eradicating diseases and other evils.
I never thought that people would even conceive of building things that could wipe out humanity.
...

"Three Things They Should Teach in Engineering 101: Lesson Number One"
article ( by Darren Ashby ? )
http://www.chipcenter.com/eexpert/dashby/dashby008.html
discusses "Unit Math" (the same as what DAV's teachers called
"dimensional analysis")
[FIXME: should this go in massmind.org, or stay here in learning.html ?]

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education.
It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli, 1874

unschooling
...
John Holt (How Children Learn, Learning all the Time, etc.),
John Gatto (Dumbing us Down),
Sheldon Richmond (Separating School and State),
Mary Griffith (The Unschooling Handbook), and others have written books about this.
--
recc. Connie Stillwell 2003-04-28

"High Performance Systems, Inc. (HPS)
is in business to improve the way the world works, by
creating systems thinking-based products and services
that enable people to
increase their capacity to think, learn, communicate, and act
more systemically."
http://hps-inc.com/

???
"community of school web sites, links and education related information"
"Schools from around the world
... schools and school districts from the United States"
http://homeroom.net/

"Too many schools do not take children on outdoor activities,
because they fear they would be sued if there was an accident"
http://theconnexion.net/wp/index.php?p=499
...
British children are being deprived in the name of keeping them safe.
A typical eight-year-old's "home habitat" - the area that children are allowed to travel around on their own --
has shrunk by 90% over the past 30 years.
...
the other parents I speak to "know" that the world is more dangerous for their children than it used to be.
Statistically though, children are no more likely to be hurt by strangers today than they were 30 years ago.
Perceived danger has increased, real danger is constant.
--
http://theconnexion.net/wp/index.php?p=496

"Give Africa a private schooling:
Poor African children benefit more from independent schools than government ones for a fraction of the cost, says James Tooley."
article by James Tooley, June 26, 2005
http://clublet.com/c/c/why?MakePovertyHistory

"It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them."
- Karl R. Popper